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Ireland needed a reliable partner to focus on enabling
and developing a new customer engagement and
experience layer, and Celfocus was pivotal in our digital
transformation journey.”
Shay Sweeney
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The Irish Wireless Market and Vodafone Ireland’s Competitive
Positioning
The Irish telecommunications market is one of the most competitive
in the
western world, with a very high penetration rate and more than 40
suppliers
covering different segments. In this context, differentiation
through innovation is
pivotal to ensure customer loyalty and business survival.
Vodafone Ireland’s network now has population coverage of 99.6% and
4G
coverage of 98%. Vodafone is also Ireland’s best mobile network,
five years in a
row - ‘Best in Test’, ‘Best in Voice’ and ‘Best in Data’ based on
network test results
conducted by independent third party Umlaut, on three major Irish
networks in
November 2019.
As CSPs worldwide move towards strengthening their role as a
value-added partner for customers and enterprises by purveying a
complete offering that includes mobile, broadband, fixed line and
television, Vodafone Ireland wanted to extend its market leadership
and innovation streak.
To adjust to a new market dynamic, driven by new customer needs and
more
aggressive competition, Vodafone Ireland embarked on a digital
transformation
journey supported, among other partners, by Celfocus.
The Project in a Nutshell
About Vodafone Ireland
• Founded in: 2001
The digital transformation programme is the largest business
transformation
initiative in Vodafone Ireland’s history. It covered all customer
touchpoints and
had a profound impact on the core CRM and billing systems, leading
to the
decommissioning of more than 25 of them, increasing the remaining
system’s
availability by 75%, and reducing go-to-market times for new
products and
services by 80%.
The Challenge
The Solution
How to be more agile, deliver great customer experiences and reduce
product and service go-to-market across different customer
segments?
Addressing this need entailed a complete overhaul of Vodafone
Ireland’s
business model and IT architecture. Vodafone Ireland’s digital
transformation was
anchored in three main building blocks:
Digital First
Ensure an excellent and consistent customer journey with a
particular focus on
omnichannel experience and digital channels.
Business Model Simplification
Simplify the business model and offer complexity to deliver the
best products.
Automation
Empower customers to engage on their terms, favouring self-service
and process
automation.
These building blocks were pivotal in driving efforts and defining
priorities for
the overall project, ensuring alignment between all stakeholders
and a sense of
purpose regarding the defined objectives.
Finding the best solution for such an ambitious transformation
raised intricate
questions. The solution would not only have to support the current
business but
also equip Vodafone for the coming years.
Available technological alternatives showed, however, that the
better equipped
they were to support Vodafone Ireland current business, the less
ready they
would be to adapt to new and unknown business scenarios.
Selecting a market-proven BSS solution would guarantee that most of
the
immediate transformation requirements would be met and gaps would
be
minimised, improving the chances of achieving the desired outcomes.
Vodafone
Ireland was, however, aware that no solution available on the
market could, at the
same time, deliver the customer experience that has become standard
to today’s
consumers.
Combining these possibly conflicting goals demanded the ability to
define a
business reality driven by customer-facing processes without
restrictions from
the underlying systems.
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System virtualisation was the approach chosen to tackle the tension
between
providing business teams with more flexibility to quickly adjust to
customer
dynamics without compromising the back-end systems’ stability. By
defining a
formal separation between customer-facing processes, with its
related data and
underlying resources, this was made possible.
With this solution, the overall IT architectures preserved the
ability to define business processes driven by customer experience
separately from the modelling restrictions imposed by traditional
systems.
Business and Technology teams have different drivers and
priorities. Business
teams favour agility, which translates to having more done in less
time and with
less cost. On the other hand, technology teams strive for
efficiency and reliability,
which usually reflects centralisation and reusability.
The untold truth is that the almost universal reusability principle
kills the
autonomy demanded by business teams. As an example, if the
Customer
Operations team idealises a change in the segmentation criteria to
improve the
handling of customer requests, they will have to validate and get
approval from
all other teams that reuse those criteria before being able to
change them.
At the same time, giving each business team full autonomy creates
operational
inefficiencies and compromises customer experience consistency.
This is the
reason why IT departments create robust governance procedures that
inevitably
hamper the speed required to get things ready.
Enabling an outside-in perspective of Vodafone Ireland’s processes
and
technology called for assisted and unassisted channels that could
evolve
autonomously, maximise the customer experience at each touchpoint,
ensure
the agility to respond quickly to market stimuli, and do it all
consistently.
Building on the virtualisation principle, Vodafone Ireland designed
a reference
IT architecture defining a clear demarcation between Systems of
Engagement
and System of Record. At the core of this architecture is Celfocus
Digital Overlay
framework, playing a determinant role in reaching out to the
business teams and
in fulfilling their new demands.
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Celfocus Digital Overlay Architecture was the first step towards
fully embracing
digital. It consists of a phased approach that paves the way to
digital architecture
and is instantiated through CELFOCUS Omnichannel Core.
CELFOCUS Omnichannel is a telco-oriented solution, developed to
ensure a consistent customer journey, regardless of the
touchpoint.
It covers sales and customer care scenarios for assisted channels
(shops, call-
centres, partners, and field engineers) and non-assisted channels
(eCommerce,
web and mobile native self-care), supported by a shared and smart
platform for a
seamless cross-channel experience.
CELFOCUS Omnichannel Core is the foundation for a truly
omnichannel
experience and acts as the backbone for many customer touchpoints
across
different devices and channels. It’s the central component of a
holistic and
transformative channel architecture which enhances customer
experience by
eliminating the software silos when customers interact with the
company.
Vodafone Ireland IT Architecture
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BSS
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This module played a central role in articulating different
requests for Systems of
Engagement and System of Record, delivering:
Vodafone Ireland’s IT architecture approach allowed for a truly
digital
transformation by combining the implementation of a digital overlay
using
CELFOCUS Omnichannel with a full BSS stack transformation to adjust
and
prepare the organisation to maintain its leadership in delivering a
rich and diverse
product portfolio with a consistent customer experience across all
channels.
The digital overlay implemented by CELFOCUS Omnichannel Core was
pivotal
in contributing to establishing a modern and open architecture
where business
teams have the necessary flexibility and openness, and the IT
organisation has the
required control, reliability and robustness.
Traditional industry solutions strive to deliver pre-packaged
standardised business processes. While this accelerates the
deployment and addresses current needs, it also locks down the
business and kills the ability to differentiate. The traditional
systems-dependent perspective will inevitably have blind spots for
the future role of telecom operators in the value chain.
Business virtualisation – Establishes the strictest
separation of the business definition from the
underlying technology.
– The logic is no longer locked down in a back-
end system like billing or CRM, nor isolated in a
self-care or eShop application. The CELFOCUS
Omnichannel Core implements and exposes the
business logic consistently to all channels.
Open architecture enablement – Ensures that all
processes and functions can be made available
by exposing meaningful APIs that internal and
external clients can use to implement their
customer journeys.
elevate the underlying systems’ performance up to
the standards of digital services.
Consolidation of fragmented back-end systems
– ensures the delivery of a consistent user
experience across all sales and care processes.
Cross-channel process continuity - delivering a
seamless experience across touchpoints can only
be achieved by implementing the business logic in
a layer common to all channels.
Capability augmentation – It also serves as a
platform to incubate tactical components and to
fulfil capability gaps left by underlying systems.
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Business Transformation Vectors
Vodafone Ireland’s digital transformation journey has enabled it to
accelerate the
delivery of innovative and convergent solutions through a myriad of
seamlessly
integrated channels, both assisted and non-assisted.
In a dynamic and very competitive market, Vodafone Ireland is well
equipped to
continue to serve and surpass customer expectations. It will
withstand the next
technological wave by using a digital-based offer which is more
adaptable and
guarantees a robust and future proof IT architecture.
Furthermore, the deployment of a digital overlay set the
foundations for the
business team to work more agilely and become increasingly flexible
and
responsive to market and customer demands.
Compliance with Vodafone Group IT Architecture
practices was, from the project’s outset, an essential
element for paving the way to developing DXL
compliant journeys using cloud-ready microservices
and for the adoption of Vodafone Group DevOps
toolset, among other initiatives.
major overhaul of Vodafone Ireland’s IT architectures
by, in parallel and while running day-to-day
operations, changing the BSS stack and deploying
the new omnichannel solution: CELFOCUS
Omnichannel. This option enables Vodafone Ireland
to leapfrog the competition and be in the best
possible position to reap the benefits from this new
digital age.
Why Celfocus Vodafone Ireland needed a reliable partner to work on
enabling and developing
a new customer engagement and experience layer. CELFOCUS
Omnichannel
played a fundamental role in addressing that need. Celfocus’s
experience and
expertise in deploying similar solutions proved to be the perfect
match.
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Offer Breadth
About Celfocus
Celfocus is a fast growing, global high-tech company with a
reputation for developing and implementing successful projects and
solutions that drive business value.
By combining a deep business knowledge with the understanding of
different technologies, while never losing sight of the customer
experience, Celfocus built a reputation leveraged on an unexcelled
track record.
Serving Clients in 25+ countries, Celfocus helps organisations
transform their business in order to improve competitive
positioning and ultimately their performance.
For more information about CELFOCUS, please visit our website
www.celfocus.com
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